Movie review by Greg Carlson The pre-eminent cinematic chronicler of his country’s history, Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman artfully revisits one of his guiding motifs in “Nostalgia for the Light,” one of the finest documentaries to make its way to United States viewers in 2011. Guzman’s oeuvre has been dominated by reflections on the 1973 Pinochet […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson The family of British playwright Andrea Dunbar is the subject of Clio Barnard’s exceptional cinematic study “The Arbor,” an engrossing piece of creative nonfiction that combines the objectively reported and the imaginatively rearranged with a level of confidence and skill seldom applied to after-the-fact restaging associated with docufiction and docudrama. […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Composed of vivid 16mm film footage culled from dozens of hours of material that had been lying dormant in Sveriges TV (Sweden’s Television, a national multi-channel public broadcasting station), “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” functions like a time capsule, teleporting viewers into the midst of America’s urban social chaos in […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Bad movies set in Hawaii vastly outnumber good ones. Elvis, Gidget, Charlie Chan, Ma and Pa Kettle, and the Brady Bunch have used the idyllic location as a stunning backdrop. Adam Sandler went there for “50 First Dates” and returned recently for the putrid “Just Go with It.” For every […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Perpetual provocateur Lars von Trier shares one of his least overtly “disobedient” stories in years with “Melancholia,” a visionary end-of-the-world disaster drama laced with a puckish streak of black comedy. Unlike controversial lightning rod “Antichrist,” the majority of the bile directed to “Melancholia” came not as a result of what […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Eerie and unsettling, Sean Durkin’s feature film debut “Martha Marcy May Marlene” addresses the psychological aftermath of one young woman’s experience with a violent and sexually and emotionally abusive Charles Manson-like cult/commune. A carefully studied landscape of disorientation and mental transience, the movie sidesteps the sub-genre’s tendency to construct a […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Locked in a battle for attention with the recent off-screen Oscar telecast tempests that bedeviled uncouth director/loose-lipped homophobe Brett Ratner and star Eddie Murphy, “Tower Heist” is vain and empty-headed. A gruesome casserole of lukewarm B.S., “Tower Heist” is predicated on the notion that a cast headed by multimillionaires playing […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Writer-director Andrew Niccol’s “In Time” returns to the blend of science fiction, politics, and thrills seen in his 1997 cult debut “Gattaca,” but with considerably less punch and effectiveness. Niccol’s interest in social (in)justice as filtered through futurism, fantasy, or speculation has ranged from the critically lauded media critique of […]